Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Corporate blogging: worried about a high bounce rate?

Every metric matters, right? When you kick off your first corporate blogging initiative, you’re looking at every number you can. Sometimes, it’s to find successes to celebrate, however small they may be. And, you may feel the need to protect yourself from naysayers who are ready to see your program fail – or “help” it along to that unfortunate conclusion. Over the past seven years, one of the stats loved by blog-haters and blog-opponents is bounce rate. For corporate blogs, it may be the least attractive number you show, and fortunately, it tends to be irrelevant.

Why is your bounce rate so high?

A high bounce rate on your corporate blog could happen for a number of reasons. When your site is new, your bounce rate may be low, especially if you go live with a substantial library of content. Every visitor is new at this point, and each will probably poke around for a while to find out what your blog is all about.

Of course, there will be some visitors during this period who respond to an initial surge of curiosity and then find out your blog isn’t relevant to them. These bounces, which are natural, will offset the new visitors who click around for a while.

As your blog matures, your core audience will grow, and these visitors will come back regularly. Unlike their early visits, these will tend to be shorter. Your core readers will already be familiar with your blog, and they are probably visiting to take a look at your newest content. There won’t be as much reason to go deep. Often, these readers will look at one page and move on. This is great news: your high bounce rate is the result of visitor loyalty. And, it’s loyalty in your target market that you ultimately want, not a low bounce rate.

Related to the visit frequency of your core readers, not publishing a lot of content can contribute to a high bounce rate. In fact, publishing a post every day – no small feat for a corporate blog – is not enough to lower your bounce rate. Visitors to your blog who subscribe via RSS or email (or who look for your newest blog posts on Twitter or Facebook) will come daily, for example, and find one new post. There’s rarely a reason to click deeper.

Successful content marketing is another reason for a high bounce rate. You’re doing a great job of attracting new visitors. If you’re doing this aggressively, you’ll naturally wind up with some portion of your traffic that isn’t a fit for your corporate blog. These guys will bounce off right away. They don’t want you, and since they aren’t in your target market, you really don’t want them. This is a side-effect of aggressive online marketing, and it will affect your bounce rate.

When will my bounce rate get better?

Your bounce rate may never actually improve, especially if you’re scouring the web for new visitors from your target market. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. Focus on the metrics that actually matter to your company, such as the sales and marketing intelligence from web analytics and contributions to your sales funnel. Metrics that feed ROI matter, and bounce rate just isn’t one of them.

As you develop a rich library of content, your bounce rate will go down. SEO will drive traffic to stories published well in the past, bringing in new visitors, some of whom will explore. This will help with your bounce rate. But, the bounce rate improvement itself isn’t the benefit to you. Rather, it’s getting a new visitor to encounter your brand that you should celebrate.

Not necessarily-- if you have a short post go up every day, your bounce rate, pages/visit and time on site will all take a hit, as your core users will get into the habit of visiting daily (or when there's something new, if you publish less than daily), reading/viewing the new piece and leaving. Ultimately, the low metrics result from a visitor loyalty, a strange dynamic.

Where bounce rate, p/v and tos do matter is in the evaluation of first-time visitors. You want newbies to arrive, stay, look around and feast on your content. That's what will turn them into long-term, frequent (and possibly short daily) visitors.

CTA can be a tough one in B2B, as the goal tends to be filling the pipeline rather than converting to a sale. I usually use cost per lead as my ultimate metric.